A Tally of Lights
by MopCat
Summary: Count me the stars Dom." Dominique Weasley/Molly Weasley II


A Tally of Lights

_"Count me the stars."_

_ She looked at her then, running her hand through a lion's mane._

_ "Sure." Dom kissed her._

--

Instead of counting, she'd shown them to her. A thousand stinging lights behind closed lids, a thousand fires beyond shut doors. A brightness that burned their way into skin and even now, in an artist's gloom, Molly shuts her eyes and remember a thousand fluttering lights.

--

_"One." _

_Molly didn't have the strength to disagree as her cousin pressed seven hot mouth kisses against her open throat. She didn't have the words to tell her that she lied. She'd counted the sky in an instant, she knew the constellations inked on the back of her eyelids. A thousand fluttering lights and she'd only shown her one._

_Dominique laughed as she pulled away from her, a gazelle's borrowed leap as she_

_stretched herself upright. "Only one Molly."_

_Her smile as bright as a curse, she dances away from her._

--

After a childhood spent together, they meet only once. A night like thunder and rage and stormy weathers. A night as planned as a ship lost at sea and as final as the last letter a dying woman sends her son.

A knock sounds – stiff, harsh, cool; an under current of the ocean that burns her ears – pulling Molly away from the soft flush of colour and paint upon paper. The same flush covers her hands and within a moment covers the cloud-white shirt she wears, an absentminded attempt to wash the stains away. Instead, flush turns to tide. And, with a movement of absentminded hands, a flush turned tide and a storm washes against the shore.

--

_She lifts one, blonde-feather of an eyebrow. "You know, you're starting to turn into Hugo." She gestures wildly at the Polaroid Camera in Molly's lap and the thick walls of photos stacked like bricks in piles around the floor. "With all the painting and drawing and photo taking."_

_Her soft body is suddenly a hot, cherry weight against the other girl's back._

_"I'll have you know, that boy couldn't draw a flower to save is bloody life, but prey, tell me; if I'm turning into our cousin, how's it feel to be fucking Hugo Weasley?"_

_She doesn't skip a beat, but her laughter washes over Molly like a crash of water,_

_"He's not quite as well endowed as I was led to believe, but I'm in the mood to forgive him."_

_She joins her laughter with Dom's continuous bark and Molly surrounds herself in the strange melody of sounds that run around the room like wild fire._

_"I wouldn't let Scorpius hear you," Molly chokes out her words, managing to make them heard before drifting back into their laughter. "He'd skin you alive with his broom handle."_

_"Less freckles too. I'd always believed he was swamped in freckles." _

--

The fact that she is wearing a dress confuses Molly more then the sensation of looking at her face once again through an open door.

A simple green scheme that flows around the material in swirls, sudden bucks and hidden messages. Molly can't bring herself to look the taller woman in the eye, and even without, she knows in an instant who stands on her doorstep.

She stands like a doll on the mantelpiece.

The dress makes her look like a fairy – a queen and thousands of other magical myths that were never the same in storybooks as they were in school textbooks – and Molly finds she hates it with all the water and blood in her body.

Dom shouldn't wear green; she belongs in blue.

--

_Dom stares across at her father – lacking the backwards tilting of her head that each of her siblings throw into their stance when they converse with the man. _

_Molly can't help but break into a secret, high-cheek smile that filters across her face – one, she knows, will send her father red in the face and crimson in ear._

_"I'm not wearing a dress dad." Dom doesn't place her hands on her hips, but the motion is left unsaid - like a silent ghost of heroes within the room. _

_Molly knows from experience that this is a long-life argument. _

_"If you weren't so bloody stubborn girl –" He doesn't finish the sentence as his daughter cuts him off with a wide-mouthed grin._

_Dom doesn't have the good grace to utter actual words into their backwards kind of conversation, but her grin in one that screams across a Quidditch pitch and leaves her father smiling grudgingly as he shakes his head._

_Molly's fingernails snag against the sky-blue sweater as the other girl skids past her, tugging at her hand. Molly allows herself to be pulled away, unravelling the tight stitches of knitting when she pulls her arm back and runs after her cousin. She laughs as they pass the fount door and Dom shouts over her shoulder – towards and through the house._

_"I'll wear a dress from Christmas."_

--

"Tea?"

"Please."

--

_"I dunno know Dom," the skin between her eyes knit, and she grasps at her cousin's gypsy hands like a lifeboat. "I dunno."_

_Molly knows that there are some lines they aren't ready to cross._

_She can't look at the taller girl while she spits out her questions, and wrenches her quidditch-stained hands from their puzzle piece grip. Instead, she watches the quick way Dom punctuates her words with movement of hands, allowing Molly to stop listening as she watches the fluttering of fingers talk._

_"What do you mean, you don't know?" Molly doesn't pretend not to notice the mocking tone in her cousin's voice. She doesn't become blind in her wishes not to see. _

_Suddenly her nostrils flare and Molly feels like she's been allowed the freedom to sail._

_"I dunno Dom, why can't you bloody just understand that._

_It's the closest she's come to losing her control on the Weasley temper and Molly can see the exact moment Dom loses herself to surprise: her hands jar to a halt. _

_Molly closes her eyes._

_Moments, hours and fucking eternities later Molly fells lips pressing into her check._

_The words that are whispered next are so sudden in their silence they hurt._

_"I don't understand." And Molly feels a kiss on her forehead._

--

Molly feels the gaze as if her cousin is tattooing her skin the moment she walks back into the room. She holds both cups of tea in her left hand and with her right, muses her hair in the nervous way she's had since a small child. It brings a smile to Dom's lips, and an answering one to her own.

Suddenly, they're sixteen again.

The flush of colour that covers her hands, top and brings the tide crashing to her door covers the dark wood table they surround.

An artist's table and one that holds her greatest painting to date.

Molly's cups are broken, chipped and mix-matched. When she raises the dark green mug to her lips and laps at the ginger tea held within, Molly can feel each scratch and dip in the porcelain with her teeth and tongue. She downs the scalding tea and watches Dom – iher/i Dom and not hers any longer – from behind the rim. Molly watches each flutter of the older girl's eyelids and each movement of animated arms. She watches as Dom tries to place her hands somewhere and anywhere where they won't reach the painting.

Molly's painting. Her masterpiece.

The canvas holds the story and wishes of her life. And in the words of Oscar Wilde, she knows she can't exhibit it: she's put too much of herself into it.

The paint holds the picture of a ship painted in between the forest.

It's eerie, washed and dreamy; and when Molly looks at it, she can hear the sound of the ocean.

"It's beautiful." Molly lowers her mug and nods, taking in the places Dom has rested her hands.

Dom isn't the half of the whole she used to be.

Molly doesn't think about her next words and when she does she doesn't take them back.

"Count me the stars." Eyes widen across the table. "Count me the fucking stars Dom."

Suddenly she's being pulled across the table and the lips that are pressed into hers taste like ginger. The word that's sounded next burns her skin and leaves marks that won't ever leave.

"Two."

Molly holds her fingers against her lips and Dom smiles. A thousand and one fluttering lights. She closes her eyes and counts them as Dom dances out her door.

---------

**_This was written for the "rarepair_shorts" fic exchange over on LiveJournal. _**


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